The present invention generally relates to computing system virtualization technologies, and more particularly relates to managing the lifecycle of virtual image assets.
Virtualization technologies, such as, for example, VMware (available from VMware, Inc. Palo Alto, Calif.), and XEN (open source virtualization software) are becoming increasingly popular. Such virtualization technologies enable a user to seamlessly partition resources of a single physical machine into multiple virtual machines (VMs). Each virtual machine runs its own operating system (OS) and software stack. Virtual image assets and software bundle assets can be changed or updated over time. Many current systems for managing these lifecycle changes of image and software bundle assets generally require an administrator to manually manage these updates. Software bundle authors and virtual machine authors manually keep track of and notify users who are using the items together, along with ad-hoc information about bundle and VM image asset compatibility. This manual tracking of updates is very cumbersome and inefficient, and sometimes even inaccurate. Also, administrators and image/software bundle authors may not know that updates have occurred to components that they used to build their images or bundles assets.